Thursday, May 28, 2009

One of the coming competitors to the Amazon Kindle revealed a little bit more about itself here at the D: All Things Digital conference, run by The Wall Street Journal. Plastic Logic, a 10-year-old company founded by two Cambridge University professors, is working on devices with E Ink reading screens on thin, flexible plastic displays.

In a demonstration of the device, Richard Archuleta, the company’s chief executive, described the device as an electronic reader designed primarily for businesspeople.

The device looks ridiculously thin, with a monochrome E Ink screen similar in size to the jumbo Kindle DX. It has no keyboard but it does have a touch screen that, with a single touch in the corner, displays a toolbar along one edge and tabs for recently read books and documents along the left-hand side. Users can change pages with a flick of the finger. Mr. Archuleta also revealed that the device will have both Wi-Fi and 3G cellular connectivity.

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